The Art Of Product Storytelling

Creating a valuable product that solves user problems is hard. Equally as difficult is convincing prospective users why they should use our product to solve their problem. As Product Managers it’s easy to fall into the trap of selling the solution - that’s the logical path. Resist it, because outside of the four walls of your office - the reality is, nobody cares.

Instead, we need to tell a story - and I don’t mean some fluffy marketing stuff, I mean the real deal. We need to be crisp communicating why this product matters to the world, how it fits into their lives and why they should care about it in the first place.

We’ll Use A Photo App As An Example

Let’s use Google Photos (or a Google Photos-like product), start by listing some of the core features:

• It uploads the photos quickly, automatically and the uploaded images are high-quality.
• Users can access photos on multiple devices including the web.
• Photos are organized automatically by date.

Now imagine we’re up on stage doing a keynote announcing this great new product to the world for the first time. What would we say? It could be something like the following:

“Today we’re excited to announce our new photo management app called Google Photos. It will allow you to automatically upload photos from any device to the web. The uploaded photos will be high-quality and accessible from any computer.”

This statement works, and we see many like it from the product marketing departments all the time. There’s a glaring problem with it though, any guess what it is? Answer: It’s not solving any problems at all.

Let’s Break It Down

1. “Today we’re excited to announce our new photo management app called Google Photos” This is fine nothing to add here - wait a minute did we say “photo management app.” What’s a photo management app? Am I looking to “manage photos”? No, probably not. As a user, I might be in need of managing photos, but I probably haven’t yet identified that as the problem. Takeaway: This statement assumes we know what the problem is. We don’t - at least not yet. We want to focus on solving the problem, not selling an assumed solution.

2. “It will allow you to automatically upload photos from any device to the web.” “Automatically” is the best part of this sentence. Users love things that are automated, so that’s a win. The main issue with this statement is the premise of uploading to the web. Uploading photos to the web can be a challenge, but it’s not a real problem. Not to mention features like this are table steaks at this point. Takeaway: If our product is assumed to have a table steak feature, don’t even say it, because it dilutes the main message.

3. “The uploaded photos will be high-quality and accessible from any computer.” Let’s break this into two parts. Part 1: “photos will be high-quality.” That’s great, but I would assume that I’d hate to think that this product will take my high-quality images and make them low-quality. Part 2: “accessible from any computer,” excellent, but how? In an app, over the web, maybe both? Takeaway: These are features, the details of these features matter but they are details and not a vital part of the story.

How Would We Tell This Story?

First, we’ll identify what the exact problem is that this product is trying to solve. When it comes to photos (or collections of anything for that matter) it’s organization. Users are typically terrible at organizing things, and if they do come up with a way to do it on their own, they struggle to stick with it. Note: I’m assuming the user problem for sake of this example. If this were the real world, we would have learned this as part of our discovery and solution testing process.

The real problem this product is solving is organization.

Next, let’s break down organization into smaller sub-problems:

• Putting photos into one destination from multiple sources.
• Grouping photos into collections.
• Searching for photos using meta-data including date, content, location etc.

Lastly, we need to think about the broader ecosystem around our product. How does it fit into the current product/device landscape? What’s the future of photography? What’s the future of photography equipment?

We’re Ready To Craft This Product Story

Remember we’re on stage in front of a thousand people - let’s go for it!

“We all know how time-consuming manually organizing photos can be, making it difficult later to find specific images. What if you never had to think about how your photos were organized? What if all you had to focus on was getting that great shot, no matter what camera or computer you used? You take the pictures, leave organizing them up to us.”

Conclusion

Product storytelling is an art that takes time to master. As we’re telling the story of our product, stay focused on the problem we’re solving not the solution we built. Our prospective users are looking to solve problems - it’s important we’re communicating the value of our product as it aligns with their problem.